When I heard that Mickey Long was leading a trip to Saddleback Butte State Park in the western Mojave about fifteen miles east of Lancaster, I quickly signed up. Mickey's field trips are always excellent, and we had a very good group for this outing. Saddleback Butte overlooks a vast alluvial plain, dotted with joshua trees and creosote bushes, made up of decomposed granite, sand and silt eroded from the mountains over millions of years. The Butte itself is a solitary 3,651' rock outcropping that dates back to the Cretaceous Period some 70 million years ago, and the 2,955-acre park is home to a great variety of wildflowers as well as foxes, rattlesnakes, rabbits and desert tortoises. We had an excellent morning poking along the Little Butte Trail from the day use area, and when everyone else had had enough, I continued up the Saddleback Butte Peak trail to the top. The views are stunning and I was able to photograph many species that we had not seen lower down. I plan on making a series of visits to Saddleback Butte over the coming months even though this may not be the best year to do it. There's always next year. An asterisk next to the common name indicates a non-native species.

Anderson's thornbush
Lycium andersonii
Solanaceae
[Named for Charles Lewis Anderson, 1827-1910]

California wild buckwheat
Eriogonum fasciculatum var. polifolium
Polygonaceae